Antenatal Depression: When Pregnancy Makes You Feel Awful
Antenatal Depression: When Pregnancy Makes You Feel Awful
There’s a very particular kind of misery that comes with being desperately grateful to be pregnant and desperately wanting not to feel pregnant anymore.
You can want this baby more than anything.
You can have planned for them, hoped for them, tried for them, gone through IVF for them.
And still wake up every morning thinking:
I can’t believe I have to do another whole day of this.
That thought can come with a lot of guilt.
Because when you’ve wanted a pregnancy, it can feel like you’re supposed to be able to tolerate whatever comes with it.
But wanting your baby doesn’t make nausea less nauseating.
Gratitude doesn’t stop you vomiting.
And knowing that pregnancy will eventually end is surprisingly unhelpful at 7.12am when you already feel awful and there’re another fourteen hours of consciousness to get through.
Pregnancy sickness doesn’t just make you sick. It takes away your life for a while.
This is the bit so many people miss.
It isn’t just the nausea.
It’s what the nausea stops you doing.
Normally, if you were having a terrible week, you might go for a walk. Meet a friend for coffee. Exercise. Get out of the house. Cook something you like. Go to dinner. Have a long shower.
Pregnancy sickness can take almost all of those options off the table.
Coffee smells revolting.
Restaurants are unbearable.
Exercise feels impossible.
A walk around the block sounds lovely until you remember that standing upright makes you feel worse.
Even showering can become a strategic operation because the heat, the smell of shampoo or simply being vertical for ten minutes is enough to tip you over the edge.
So when people say, “Try to do something nice for yourself”, there aren’t a lot of options.
Because almost everything that usually makes you feel like you has temporarily disappeared.
Your whole day starts revolving around not feeling worse
Pregnancy sickness has a way of shrinking your world.
You start thinking in tiny increments.
Can I sit up?
Can I drink this?
Will that food stay down?
If I eat now, will I feel worse?
If I don’t eat now, will I also feel worse?
Can I make it through school pick-up without vomiting?
Do I have enough energy to wash my hair, or should I save that energy for making dinner?
There can also be this constant background vigilance around food and smells.
Someone opens the fridge and you want to leave the house.
Your partner cooks something you normally love and suddenly the smell is offensive on a molecular level.
A food is tolerable on Tuesday and absolutely disgusting by Thursday.
You finally find something you can eat, eat it for four days straight, and then your body decides that food is dead to you too.
The mental load of it is exhausting.
And then there’s the boredom
This part doesn’t get talked about enough.
Being sick for a few days is unpleasant.
Being sick for weeks or months is unpleasant and also … incredibly boring.
You can’t necessarily go anywhere.
You can’t concentrate properly.
You stop making plans because you don’t know how you’ll feel.
Your world can become the couch, the bed, the bathroom and your phone.
Everyone else is going to work, having dinner, exercising, taking their kids places, complaining about normal things - living their lives.
And you’re lying down wondering how it’s only 10.43am.
That loss of normal life can have a huge impact on mood.
If you already have children, there’s no real sick leave
This can be one of the hardest parts of a difficult second or third pregnancy.
The first time around, perhaps you could finish work and go straight to bed.
Now someone needs a snack.
And then a different snack.
And then help finding the blue cup that is apparently the only acceptable cup despite there being seven identical cups in the cupboard.
There are lunches to make, uniforms to find, daycare drop-offs, bath time, bedtime and small people who are completely uninterested in the fact that you feel like you have gastro every day.
Parenting becomes something you have to do horizontally from the couch.
Screens become a lifeline and something you use far more than you normally would.
Playing and doing fun things with you kids feels impossible.
And then comes the guilt.
I'm such a boring mum at the moment.
My child is missing out because of me.
I'm barely coping with the child I already have - how am I going to manage another one?
Those thoughts can be brutal.
But being temporarily less available because you’re unwell isn’t the same as being a bad parent.
You’re sick.
You’re parenting while sick.
You’re surviving the best way you can.
“Morning sickness” is an annoyingly cheerful name for something that can be horrendous
Early pregnancy can be lonely and part of that feeling comes from the fact that nausea and vomiting are so common in pregnancy that people can treat them as trivial.
“Oh yes, I was sick too.”
“Have you tried ginger?”
“Crackers before you get out of bed!”
“Hopefully it'll be gone by 12 weeks.”
And sometimes it is.
Sometimes it isn't.
When you feel awful all day, every day, hearing your experience described as a normal little pregnancy inconvenience can make you feel like you're being dramatic for struggling.
You're not.
Something can be common and still relentless and misery-inducing.
This is how antenatal depression can sneak in
It may not start with a dramatic thought of I'm depressed.
It can start with:
I don't want to wake up tomorrow and do this again.
I don't look forward to anything.
I feel like I've disappeared.
Everyone else is living and I'm just getting through days.
You might withdraw from others because seeing people feels too hard.
You might stop doing things you’d usually enjoy because you physically can't do them.
You might feel irritable with your partner, disconnected from the pregnancy or resentful of a body that seems to have completely taken over your life.
And then you might judge yourself for feeling all of that because this baby is wanted.
That's a fairly miserable loop to get stuck in.
So what actually helps when you can't make the sickness disappear?
You may not be able to make yourself feel good right now.
That can be a frustrating thing to accept, but also a freeing one.
Maybe the goal needs to be making the day less bad.
1. Stop measuring your days by normal-life standards
Your current job isn’t to keep doing everything you usually do while also being pregnant.
If you're significantly unwell, you’re operating under completely different conditions.
Ask: What absolutely has to happen today?
Not what should happen.
Not what normally happens.
What actually has to happen.
Feed yourself somehow. Feed the children somehow. Take medication. Get through essential work if you have to.
The washing can stay there.
Dinner can come from a packet.
Your children can watch television.
This is not your new family philosophy.
It's triage.
2. Find your tiny list of tolerable things
When almost everything makes you feel worse, stop looking for things that make you feel amazing.
Look for things that make you feel 2% better.
A cold room.
A particular drink.
Lying outside for ten minutes.
A shower at a certain time of day.
One television show that distracts you.
A friend who can sit beside you without expecting conversation.
A food you can currently tolerate.
Make an actual list.
When your world becomes small, having five reliable things that make the day marginally easier matters more than finding some grand self-care activity.
3. Create an “I cannot do this right now” list
This can be even more useful than a to-do list.
What can you temporarily stop?
Cooking?
Grocery shopping?
Bath time?
School lunches?
Social commitments?
Hosting people?
Cleaning bathrooms?
Work travel?
Get those tasks off your plate deliberately rather than ‘failing’ to do them every day and feeling guilty about it.
Then work out who or what can replace you.
Partner. Grandparent. Friend. Cleaner. Grocery delivery. Frozen meals. Before-school care.
The question isn’t Should I be able to do this?
It's Does this need to be done by me right now?
4. Give people specific instructions for helping
People are often terrible at knowing what to do with long-term sickness.
“Let me know if you need anything” puts the organisational job straight back onto you.
Try:
“Could you take the kids from 3–5 on Saturday?”
“Can you bring something for dinner that doesn't smell strongly?”
“Could you do school pick-up on Wednesday?”
“Can you come over and fold washing while I lie here and complain?”
Specific help is much easier to accept.
5. Divide the pregnancy into smaller pieces
Thinking I have another 22 weeks of this can feel unbearable.
Don't do 22 weeks today.
Do today.
Sometimes do the next hour.
Sometimes do until lunch.
If you have appointments or milestones coming up, use those instead.
Get to Friday.
Get to your next obstetrician appointment.
Get through this week.
Then reassess.
When something is relentless, shrinking the time horizon can make it psychologically much easier to tolerate.
6. Keep one thread connecting you to your normal self
Pregnancy sickness can make you feel like you've temporarily vanished.
So keep one tiny thing that belongs to you.
A podcast.
A ridiculous television series.
A group chat.
Reading.
Doing your nails in bed.
An audiobook while you lie with your eyes closed.
It doesn't need to be productive, healthy or enriching.
It just needs to remind you that underneath the nausea, you're still in there.
7. Treat the sickness - not just your reaction to it
If pregnancy sickness is interfering with eating, drinking or functioning, keep talking to your medical team.
Don't assume you're supposed to endure it because nausea is “normal in pregnancy”.
Tell your GP, obstetrician or midwife exactly what your day looks like.
Not just “I'm still nauseous.”
Tell them:
“I can't prepare food.”
“I can't work.”
“I can't look after my children properly.”
“I'm vomiting this many times.”
“I'm struggling to drink.”
“The nausea is affecting my mood.”
Functional impact matters.
And if the treatment you've tried isn't enough, go back.
8. Say the ugly thoughts out loud
You need at least one person you can tell the truth to.
I hate this.
I'm not enjoying being pregnant.
I'm jealous of people having normal pregnancies.
I'm scared this will never end.
I'm finding it hard to feel excited about the baby because all I associate pregnancy with is feeling awful.
Those thoughts don't need correcting.
Sometimes they just need somewhere to go.
A psychologist can also help if low mood, anxiety or hopelessness are becoming part of the picture - not because therapy can make nausea disappear, but because you shouldn't have to carry the psychological part of this alone as well.
And please stop asking yourself whether you're grateful enough
You can be incredibly grateful for your baby.
And absolutely fed up with pregnancy.
You can love the child you're carrying and feel no affection whatsoever for the process of carrying them.
You can count down the days until they're born without wishing them away.
There isn't a moral prize for enjoying pregnancy.
Sometimes the achievement is simply getting through it.
One day at a time.
Sometimes one hour at a time.
And on the particularly bad days, perhaps with takeaway for dinner, a lot of television and absolutely no guilt about either.
If any of this feels familiar, we’re here to help. Contact us to find out more about how we can support you.
